One of the most unusual trials in recent memory in Connecticut is set to begin this week, when seven of the 11 men on the state's death row will be brought into a makeshift courtroom at a prison in Somers as they challenge the fairness of the death penalty.

The inmates are suing the state, alleging racial and geographic biases in how prosecutors seek the death penalty and seeking to have their death sentences overturned. After seven years of legal wrangling, the trial is scheduled to start Wednesday.

"The issue is whether the death penalty in Connecticut has been administered in a discriminatory or arbitrary way," said David Golub, a Stamford attorney representing condemned killer Sedrick Cobb.

...

The key evidence for the inmates is a study by Stanford University professor John Donahue, a former Yale University professor who reviewed the nearly 4,700 murders in Connecticut from 1973 to 2007. Among those, Donahue said 205 were death penalty-eligible cases that resulted in a homicide conviction, and defendants in 138 of the 205 murders were charged with capital felony.

The end results of those murder prosecutions were 66 capital felony convictions, nine death sentences and the execution of serial killer Michael Ross in 2005.

Donahue said he found that minority defendants who murder white victims are three times as likely to receive a death sentence as white defendants who murder white victims. He also found that minority defendants who commit death penalty-eligible murders of white victims are six times as likely to receive a death sentence as minority defendants who commit death penalty-eligible murders of minority victims.

Cobb, a former delivery man from Naugatuck, was convicted of capital felony, kidnapping, murder, sexual assault and robbery in the Dec. 16, 1989, attack on 23-year-old Julia Ashe of Watertown. Sentenced on 8/13/1991.

Stanford/Yale University, exactly where I look for unbiased information on things like the death penalty. /s

It is beyond my acceptance that a person can willfully and forcibly take the life of any other person e.g. murder without having their own life in jeopardy. We don’t even accept such a scenario in military combat. I do believe that all due consideration, even post trial, must be done as to the nature of the crime. However removing the possibility of death penalty does not establish an equality of lives.

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